Kyle Beachy gifts us with the fourth installment of his What Blessing Is This series, in which he experiments with the relationship between words and photos featuring images authored by friends / collaborators. This edition features photos from Sarah Meurle.

The Knock, Part One

You are inside your familiar home, comfortably. Good morning. You make breakfast and drink coffee while watching your laptop. After that, you move your fingers in the way that turns on music to accompany the small tasks you’ve been meaning to do–watering the plants, changing the cat litter, swiffering and windexing and attending to the basic things of a life.

It’s your home. You don’t sing well, but you do enjoy singing. So you move around the apartment singing poorly but loudly because who cares? The point of life, in a way, is to not care. You blast the music, dust the mirror, and sing without reservation. As a result, you don’t fully register the sound of a knock on your apartment door.

The second knock is too loud to miss and seems to carry something of its own premonition, a kind of reverse echo that stops you in your tracks.

It’s strangely electric, this back-dated certainty. There was a first knock that you didn’t hear but can hear now, coming from the past. It’s like a slight stutter, or warp in the grid of time. You feel a charge in your posture, standing tall and sure and smiling as the moment swirls about you.

In the entryway mirror, you see yourself standing there holding the watering can in both hands like a thing someone has asked you to help with. Like, just hold this a second I’ll be right back.

The Grid Warps and Windows Reflect

During the years when I was a professor of creative writing, I took as my primary task teaching students to read. Most of us are pretty good at moving our eyes across words and gathering information, but this isn’t reading, not really. Reading, as I understand it, is a kind of labor not unlike the labor of listening and conversing, or the labor of making art, or even the labor of skateboarding. Reading is not collecting, nor is it like cleaning up a spill. Reading is an act of creativity.

That was the idea.

Some of my students saw things differently. By default, their labor was devoted to identifying or not identifying with the assigned book or story. Their eyes moved like searchlights across a dark field, trying to see reflections of themselves inside the text. Times when these efforts failed, they would either stop reading or cultivate a protest that became its own work. Like compiling, for example, all the sentences “that no normal person would ever say out loud,” and presenting them to me as a self-sufficient argument.

Where I live now, in the desert, there are all of these medium-sized dogs, heeler mixes I guess, that scurry and bark and kick up dust on the private sides of the fences that mark property lines. It’s worth slowing down sometimes to watch. They’re so chaotically aligned, these dogs, digging in against possible threats to defend what’s familiar.

The Short Term Rental

For a week in September, the three of us met each morning at the Brooklyn apartment we’d rented for the purpose of doing our work. The Dancer and I would walk for breakfast in the neighborhood and then come back and wait for The Designer, who lived nearby, to arrive by Citi Bike. Once she did, we’d continue our collaboration toward the performance that we’re making together.

It’s disorienting to be a stranger inside of another stranger’s home. I do not prefer the sterile anonymity and vapid cheer of dedicated short term rentals, but at least there I’m saved the constant, haunting sense of having opened the wrong door. Eye-dropped into an actual living person’s home, I find myself skimming along surfaces, never wanting to touch any one thing for too long.

As for our collaboration, my god it is hard. The three of us live far apart and go months without speaking. We have no director, no leader. Our week in the stranger’s apartment saw sudden breakthroughs followed by dry and frustrating days of disagreement and impatience, conversations that felt like they went nowhere.

But isn’t creation often exactly this way? Yes, in fact it’s the only way I know. And yet how dire this all felt during that week. How aimless we seemed, and how doomed our project. Which I suppose is a major lesson about working with other people in just about any capacity: How easy it is to suspect that things should be easier.

The Knock, Part Two

Soon, the third knock comes heavy against the door. A real pounding this time, and you bend to set the watering can on the floor then stand with a bit of a rush to the head. What if this person at the door needs help? The question winds into your gut, where it coils and tightens. The fourth knock is like thunder through your skull.

Maybe better to wait this one out, like with a Jehova’s witness or those people selling shares in energy co-ops. You don’t owe this person anything. In fact as far as they know you’re not even here.

Except now it occurs to you that the music is definitely loud enough for whoever’s out there to hear it. Also, your singing. Now there is heat along your neck and ears. You didn’t ask for this, that’s for sure.

And isn’t it even kind of fucked up that anyone out in the world can just walk up to any door they want? Whenever? With the only thing separating us from some possible mass murderer being the flimsy particle board or whatever cheap material doors are made of these days?

Just as you’re thinking yeah, man, maybe it’s time for a security camera, that’s when you smell the first hints of smoke. You hear sirens not far in the distance, getting closer, and panicked voices coming from the building’s courtyard. You cough. Cough. Then the next batch of knocks rings out and this time they sound completely different.

Overheard

We don’t have enough time left to be spending it this way, says my mother to my father.

Later, I will understand that she’s speaking specifically about their retirement. But that is not how I hear her on this particular morning, sitting with my coffee inside of their home.

We do not have enough time left to be spending it this way.

What Blessing is This #4: Sarah Meurle